Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Ray Rice (your e-mail)

Ian Tyrrell sent this in last weekend:I just wanted to point out that when you say that female->male domestic violence is considerably rarer than the other way around, you may hurt any of the male victims who read your posts by belittling their experience.In Australia it's called 'family violence', which I think makes it feel worse (rightly so) than 'domestic violence', but over here, and I'd assume it would be similar in the US, the rate of male victims is actually around 1 in 3, or even higher [in the U.S. it's roughly 1-6]. There's some interesting reading about it here: http://www.oneinthree.com.au/overview/.I used to think that violence of this type was purely enacted by men, but after having interacted with some male victims, I can see that I was completely wrong. But I imagine that my response was fairly typical when first hearing about it. What would your first thought be if a friend told you his wife had hit him?I'd love it if family violence of all types was a thing of the past, but unfortunately it's definitely still a reality now, and it is very much not relegated to men beating women.
This was certainly not my intention.

While men are, on average, larger and stronger than women (and we generally have much higher testosterone levels), that's not to imply that women never hit men, or that men can't be injured as a result. Statistics do not matter when you're getting punched in the face.